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'It was nine before we had finished replacing the pigs in the hold, a filthy but delicate operation, as they fit like a puzzle, and if one is out of place the floor-boards won't shut down. Coming on deck after it, we saw to our surprise the Blitz, lying at anchor in the Schill Balje, inside Spiekeroog, about a mile and a half off.

Here's the best I can see on the chart a big triangular beacon marked on the very point of Memmert. You'll pass it. 'All right. I'm off. 'Good luck, said Davies, faintly. I stepped out, climbed a miry glacis of five or six feet, reached hard wet sand, and strode away with the sluggish ripple of the Balje on my left hand.

Our business was to explore the Pike and the Fork and the channels which ramify through them. I use the general word 'channel', but in fact they differ widely in character, and are called in German by various names: Balje, Gat, Loch, Diep. Rinne.

From over the water on my left there rang out, dulled by fog, but distinct to the ear, three double strokes on a bell or gong. I looked at my watch. 'Ship at anchor, I said to myself. 'Six bells in the afternoon watch. I knew the Balje was here a deep roadstead, where a vessel entering the Eastern Ems might very well anchor to ride out a fog.

This time we were so situated that when the rising tide came again we were on a lee shore, broadside on to a gale of wind which was sending a nasty sea with a three-mile drift to give it force down Robin's Balje, which is one of the deeper arteries I spoke of above, and now lay dead to windward of us. The climax came about ten o'clock at night.

We must cross the See-Gat and strike that boomed channel, the Memmert Balje; strike it, freeze on to it can't cut off an inch and pass that "watershed" you see there before it's too late. It's an infernally bad one, I can see. Not even a dinghy will cross it for an hour each side of low water. 'Well, how far is the "watershed"? 'Good Lord! What are we talking for? Change, man, change!

He caught hold of it, and we brought up. 'Rest for three minutes now, he said. 'We're in fairly good time. It was 11.10. I ate some biscuits and took a nip of whisky while Davies prepared for the next stage. We had reached the eastern outlet of Memmert Balje, the channel which runs east and west behind Juist Island, direct to the south point of Memmert.

How we had reached it was incomprehensible to me at the time, but the reader will understand by comparing my narrative with the dotted line on the chart. The check was caused by a deep indentation in the Itzendorf Flat; a cul-de-sac, with a wide mouth, which Davies was very near mistaking for the Balje itself. The next three miles were the most critical of all.